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Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

deusinmachina.net

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Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#81

Post by bigiain »

raphlinus wrote: post #33

A lot of the cultural phenomena around Rust can best be explained in religious terms. It's no accident that we are sometimes referred to as the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force," and the word "zealot" is frequently used, of course largely by critics. There's a deeper level as well. The concept of "memory safety" which is a core principle of Rust has, I believe, a lot in common with religious concepts of purity and clean…

> “The Rust Evangelism Task Force”

I miss n-gate’s weekly HN annotated digests.

I hope whoever they are/were is doing well…

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#82

Post by beebmam »

raphlinus wrote: post #33

A lot of the cultural phenomena around Rust can best be explained in religious terms. It's no accident that we are sometimes referred to as the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force," and the word "zealot" is frequently used, of course largely by critics. There's a deeper level as well. The concept of "memory safety" which is a core principle of Rust has, I believe, a lot in common with religious concepts of purity and clean…

When you say that the advocacy for Rustlang can be "best explained in religious terms", how did you come to the conclusion that, when quantified, the other reasons for this behavior are less than the religious one?

Are you certain you are not assuming that Rustlang advocates are arguing in bad faith?

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#83

Post by praptak »

My closest to religious experience was a C program crashing after removing an unused variable. I repeated this and tested multiple times by adding and removing the variable and running the program.

Now I obviously have a believable rational hypothesis for that behaviour but then it was mystical. I left the variable and got a passing grade (it was a student program).

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#84

Post by bigiain »

Taywee wrote: post #39
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I use Deities & Demigods for hostnames I do the same. My primary development machine is 'ptah': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptah Firewall is 'anubis'. Had a print server named 'loki'. Never again.

Same here, except Lovecraft deities. My domain is rlyeh, and my hostnames at the moment are yog-sothoth, azathoth, and nyarlathotep. cthulhu, dygra, and yidhra are retired hosts.

I guess that’s one way to remember how to spell those words…

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#85

Post by Gigachad »

praptak wrote: post #83

My closest to religious experience was a C program crashing after removing an unused variable. I repeated this and tested multiple times by adding and removing the variable and running the program. Now I obviously have a believable rational hypothesis for that behaviour but then it was mystical. I left the variable and got a passing grade (it was a student program).

This is usually the result of undefined behavior somewhere else. Undefined behavior is so insidious because it creates exactly these unexplainable situations. Probably the compiler was running some kind of reordering or optimization which is proven to be safe for defined behavior but when run on UB code, causes the program to segfault on changes that would normally be no op.

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#86

Post by jiggawatts »

wruza wrote: post #80
jiggawatts wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name is the reason. You see, it is the File Transfer Protocol. Do you need to transfer a file? Use the protocol designed to transfer files! Why would you use something silly like a Hypertext protocol for binary!? I see similar conflation of the name-vs-reality all the time. My favourite is the “secure” network that is differentiated not by firewall access policy, but by name only. Literally just a label.

Do you need to transfer a file? Use the protocol designed to transfer files! Why would you use something silly like a Hypertext protocol for binary!? Because it’s faster with http, doesn’t require firewall/nat trickery at either side, is secure out of box via https, can be easily gui-ed via index plugin, cached via a proxy/cdn, supports “moved elsewhere” and other issue reporting. And if you ignore that “Hypertext” w…

It's a pity there's no font-style for sarcasm, like italic or bold...

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#87

Post by benj111 »

teddyh wrote: post #31
kragen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if geoffrey james asks me to i'll take it down but i've had it online for i think 26 years and i don't think he minds http://canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming

Your use of the ASCII character sequences `` and '' as substitutes for “ and ” are antiquated at best. It only looked good on old X11 fonts, and that was a misfeature of those fonts to begin with. There is also many mistakes in your text: Where, in 1.1, your web page has “The user is pleased and there exists harmony in the world.”, my book (7th edition) has “The user is pleased and there is harmony in the world.” In…

> Your use of the ASCII character sequences `` and '' as substitutes for “ and ” are antiquated at best

30 year old thing does thing that was common 30 years ago.

You know the book uses outdated terminology and probably doesn't use colour.

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#88

Post by pjmlp »

ajuc wrote: post #23
dale_glass wrote: post #8

One weird thing I noticed over time is the enshrinement of old and crappy technologies, in the face of all reason. Some examples: Some people for some reason I can't understand have warm and fuzzy feelings about FTP, despite it being a horrible protocol in multiple ways. Yet, for a long time it was often thought of being the "proper" way to download stuff, even though even HTTP is technically better in many respects.…

I much prefer Unix philosophy to contenerized microservices for Todo list app philosophy.

Microservices is UNIX philosophy of multiprocessing and IPC taken to the network level.

Sun Microsystems business quote on their manuals, "The network is the computer".

Then again, besides being a famous book quote, most commercial UNIXes never cared about such philosophy.

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#89

Post by nurettin »

bigiain wrote: post #81
raphlinus wrote: post #33

A lot of the cultural phenomena around Rust can best be explained in religious terms. It's no accident that we are sometimes referred to as the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force," and the word "zealot" is frequently used, of course largely by critics. There's a deeper level as well. The concept of "memory safety" which is a core principle of Rust has, I believe, a lot in common with religious concepts of purity and clean…

> “The Rust Evangelism Task Force” I miss n-gate’s weekly HN annotated digests. I hope whoever they are/were is doing well…

I think it was just a long rant. After a while it just got repetitive and wasn't maintainable anymore. But it was fun while it lasted.

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#90

Post by nurettin »

praptak wrote: post #83

My closest to religious experience was a C program crashing after removing an unused variable. I repeated this and tested multiple times by adding and removing the variable and running the program. Now I obviously have a believable rational hypothesis for that behaviour but then it was mystical. I left the variable and got a passing grade (it was a student program).

It sounds like an array size problem. int a[50]; int unused; a[50]=55; // UB, but compiler probably placed unused after a[49] which prevented the crash.
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